Marked Happisburgh, Norfolk

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The first people in Britain

Britain was joined to Europe for most of the Ice Age, and early humans walked in. Footprints on the beach at Happisburgh in Norfolk are about 850,000 years old or more; at Boxgrove in Sussex, people butchered a horse about 500,000 years ago.

Date
About 900,000 to 400,000 years agoI · Early human ancestry
Place
Happisburgh, Norfolk · Boxgrove, West Sussex · Swanscombe, KentEurope
Laid out as
A siteOne place known mainly from digging, read layer by layer from the top down.
Lessons
4 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IFootprints on a Norfolk beach
  2. IIBoxgrove: the horse and the hand axes
  3. IIIWho were they?
  4. IVWhy Britain was empty, again and again

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Nick Ashton
  • Mark Roberts

Objects

  • The Happisburgh footprints (now washed away)
  • The Boxgrove hand axes
  • The Swanscombe skull

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

902,000 years ago to 402,000 years ago. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?